A Gendered Machine is any non-human, mechanical object that is associated with, signifies, or is explicitly assigned a gender. My project is concerned with understanding how these phenomena manifest in both lived and fictional realities. Here, a typical polarization is revealed in our relationships to machines. Forms of labeling that reflect limited understandings of gender identity are imposed onto the objects that people create, use, and identify with, where things are generally understood to be either objects of service or of domination. This is a patriarchal oversimplification that my work seeks to complicate. 

Guiding this project is an intent to understand the effect that tropes within pop-culture representations actively have on our shifting relationships to mechanical objects—from common utilitarian tools to instruments of monumental power. I focus this work within three scopes—Body, Voice, and Spirit—each acting as a nexus where patterns of signification are explored across works within a century of robot films. Through these lenses, I address how common socio-spiritual relationships converge within figurations of the mechanical, both worshiped and feared for the power that they hold. The imagined ideal of perpetual progress, featured throughout the Science Fiction genre, is both a figurative and very real expression of patriarchal dominance over the world, through a mastery and wielding of science. When fantastical figurations of the future sync the creation of humanoid technology with traditions of powerful feminized tropes, audiences are left to wrestle with her simultaneous signification as both idol and demon. 

The descriptor Gendered Machines also reflects the culturally constructed mechanisms by which categorization is imposed onto the ways we choose or are allowed to identify. The criteria for correctness, which dictate the production processes for the imagery and objects that culturally define us, are still nearly always generated out of patriarchal projections. Just as an ideal femininity is socially invented to serve male desires, technological artifacts, tools and media, are built to fulfill the needs of the historically male-controlled landscape of invention, a system that often figures white, wealthy, heterosexual maleness as a homogenized representation of all human experience. Generated from investigations into the design process for commonplace computerized objects, interwoven histories of influence are revealed through this project. In these, a web of representations that are produced through repeated narratives in film have aligned our understandings of both agentic object-hood and the construction of gender expectations.